Ukraine war sends message to ‘aggressors around the world’, Blinken tells Quad meeting
Left to Right – US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Indian Foreign Minister Subramaniam Jaishankar pose for a photo after the Indo-Pacific Quad Foreign Ministers’ Roundtable. March 3. (Photo: Mani Sharma/AFP/Getty Images)
Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and support for Kiev from countries around the world sends a powerful message that “aggressors will be around the world,” US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said Friday during a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit. .
“One of the reasons that countries outside of Europe are paying more attention to this and working to support and challenge Ukraine is because they know it will have an impact here,” Blinken said in New Delhi.
“If Russia is allowed to do what it is doing in Ukraine with impunity, we will send a message to occupiers around the world that they can get away with it too.”
Blinken met with his counterparts from India, Japan and Australia in what is known as the “Quad” or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue.
The Quad has been an informal defense-focused group since the early 2000s, though it has become more active in recent years as part of efforts to counter Chinese overreach and territorial claims in the Indo-Pacific.
Blinken added that the challenges facing people around the world cannot be addressed “by one country acting alone”.
“The great power of the QUAD is that you have four like-minded countries, united in their core values, united in their core interests, with different strengths, experiences, different comparative ways of solving these problems,” he said.
Although he did not mention any “potential aggressor”, he made several veiled references, saying that the Quad was working to increase knowledge of the maritime domain of countries to prevent illegal fishing.
